In Spain, then, the Renaissance met something on which it could secure no hold, something in a sense barbarous, not quite European, and recalcitrant to all classic influences. In England it met a strong national genius, but not one which was entirely alien. Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe showed the influence of the Renaissance, not as mere imitators of forms, but as Englishmen, and yet fully. In Shakespeare it was included with much more. Its love of beauty and its sense of form were never better expressed than in the lyrics. The difference between the two nations is profound. The Spaniard either copied the mere form, or produced what one feels would have come as a natural growth from the Middle Ages, the Libro de Caballerías, the Novela de Picaros, the Auto Sacramental, and even the comedia, in which no trace of the classic influence is to be seen. A drama which is in no sense classic might have developed from the morality and the farce. As much might be said of the form of the English drama. Seneca might have been forgotten, and Tansillo might never have written (without Seneca he never would have written as he did), as far as the construction of the English play is concerned. But then much of the Renaissance spirit did pass into Elizabethan literature. We could not deduct what it shared with Italy without fatal loss. The genius of Spenser could perhaps have dispensed with a teacher, but as a matter of fact it did not. With no model save Chaucer he would yet have been one of the greatest of poets. He would not have been exactly the poet he was without Ariosto, Tasso, and Du Bellay. Shakespeare had, of all sons of Adam, the least need to borrow, and yet without the influence of the Renaissance we should not have the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, or many passages in the plays. The English genius, in fact, accepted and absorbed the Renaissance without losing its native independence. All the manifestations of its freedom were not equally admirable. The wild incoherence of the early dramatists is not good in itself. When we see it at its worst, we are half tempted to wish that Greene and Marlowe had been more subservient. Yet it was good in so far as it was a striving after an ideal both national and good. It was the necessary preparation for Shakespeare and the great things of the Elizabethan drama. If the time was less mighty in prose than in verse, yet the germs of all that was to come were in Hooker. He had the secret of lucid arrangement, the art of dealing with the greatest questions in his own tongue, and in a form at once unaffected, instantly intelligible to the average thoughtful man, and yet eloquent where the occasion required him to rise above the usual level of speech. The natural aptitude of the French for discipline in literature, and their tendency to form schools, to set up a doctrine, and to reject all that is not compatible with it, have never been more strongly shown than during the Later Renaissance. Other influences were at work. It would be very rash to say that classic or Italian models had a visible influence on Carloix's memoirs of Vielleville, or the commentaries of Monluc, or even the vast unnamed, or misnamed, compilation of Brantôme. Yet the Renaissance did, on the whole, dominate France, though it could not eliminate, or suppress, what was essentially French. Its intense interest in the life and the character of man was never better shown than by Montaigne. In poetry the attempt to adapt the classic and Italian models to French use swept all before it. Nowhere was the French disposition to find its freedom in the service of a classic model more clearly seen than in the drama of the Pléiade. It is true that Jodelle, Garnier, Belleau, Grévin, and the others may be said to have failed. They did not produce dramatic literature which has much more than an any The interest of curiosity. Yet the later history of the French stage proves that they were making their efforts on lines congenial to their nation. dramatists of the Augustan age did no more than work in the same spirit, and to the same ends as their forgotten predecessors, with altered-and but slightly altered-means. A comparison between the three literatures will go far to explain their respective fates. For the Spanish there could not well be any future. A strong national character, unchanging, and so close in the fibre that it never really admits a foreign influence, could not well do more than express itself once. The time came when it had said its say—and nothing then remained except, first mere juggling with words, and then silence -Góngorism and Decadence. In England and in France there was the hope, and even the assurance, of far more to come. Though the Spanish story has been carried beyond the dates allowed for France and England, there is no unfairness in this sentence. 1616 Lope had still much of his best work to do. Quevedo, Calderon, and Góngora were to come; but the first and second brought nothing, or at least very little, absolutely new, and the third brought destruction. Lope was only to do what he had done already. When Shakespeare died in England and Mathurin Regnier in France, a long succession was to follow them. Englishmen and Frenchmen had learnt their lesson from the Renaissance, and were to use their knowledge. INDEX. Acuña, Ferdinand de, 43. Camoens, Luiz da, 57-59. Alarcon, Juan Ruiz de, 83, 93, Campion, Thomas, 189. 102-105. Aleman, Mateo, 7, 137, 141. Antonio, Biblioteca Hispana, 3. Baïf, Jean Antoine de, 293, 301. Bartas, Du, 303-306. Cancioneros, the, 10 sq. Cano, Dominican Melchior, 46. Castillejo, Cristobal de, 10, 25, 35. Cervantes, 5, 61, 120 sq., 145-156. Charron, Pierre, 350. Coloma, Carlos, Marquis of Espinar, Bellay, Joachim du, 24, 293 sq., Cruz, Juan de la, 179, 183. Daniel, Samuel, 213-215. Biblioteca de Aribau or de Riba- Daurat, Jean, 292, 301. Dekker, 276. 298-300. Cueva, Juan de la, 37 sq., 71, 92. Belleau, Remi, 293, 300. Bertaut, Jean, 299. deneyra, 40 note. Borrow, George, 26. Brantôme, Pierre de, 336. Bruno, Giordano, 360-365. Bodin, Jean, 329. Boscan, Juan, 10, 30 sq., 41. Breton, 272. Burton, Sir Richard, 58 note. Calderon, 80, 83-90, 93, 94, 111-120. Diálogo de la Lengua, 23. Drayton, 210, 216-219. Encina, Juan del, 8, 10, 64 sq. Ercilla, Alonso de, 54 sq. Espinel, Vicente, 143. Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 58 note. |